City Hall facing growing pressure over school segregation

Mayor Bill de Blasio and city schools chancellor Carmen Fariña are facing increased pressure to address widespread segregation in New York City public schools, as evidenced by controversy around two rezonings and a growing chorus of critics in the City Council and education advocacy sector.

A group of charter school leaders, councilmembers and advocates criticized the de Blasio administration for not taking action on segregation during a panel discussion on Monday evening convened by NYC Collaborates, a coalition group that includes charter and district schools leaders, and sponsored by the New York City Charter School Center.

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“The political establishment and the education bureaucracy in our city, as well as the whole country generally, has chosen to maintain and reinforce the status quo of segregation,” said Ritchie Torres, a Bronx councilmember who is leading a Council push to diversify schools, along with Brooklyn councilmembers Brad Lander and Inez Barron.

“In many ways the moral vision behind Brown v. Board of Education has been overturned by our leaders,” Torres added.

Both Lander and Torres pointed to legislation they introduced months ago seeking to hold the Department of Education accountable for addressing segregation and to obtain more data on school demographics.

On Monday, Lander criticized the administration for not working to replicate existing models of integrated schools in Brooklyn. “Some [integration] is happening in our system, but we aren’t measuring [those programs], we aren’t doing enough to support them, we aren’t giving them the resources,” he said. “Let’s even try to set some targets, today we have a very small percentage of our students in integrated schools, what would it look like to double that in the next five or ten years,” Lander added.

Todd Sutler, the co-director of the Compass Charter School in Fort Greene, which is largely integrated, also pushed elected officials to focus on integration. “We’re not really encouraging our legislators to make it a priority,” he said.

Sutler and others argued that charter schools, particularly independent charters, can help address segregation in schools. Community Roots Charter, an independent school in Brooklyn, is 41 percent black and 39 percent white, for example.

De Blasio, who has battled with pockets of the charter sector over school space, has recently praised charters that share their best practices with the district at large, and may embrace integrated charters as part of any diversity policy he announces. Most of the city’s large charter networks, however, are overwhelmingly black and Hispanic.

There is no question that the city’s schools are deeply segregated.

District 7 in the Bronx, for example, is 70 percent Hispanic, and 92 percent of the district’s students live in poverty. District 18 in Brooklyn is 88 percent black, with 82 percent of students in poverty. A UCLA study found that some schools have become less integrated over the last several decades: in 1970, a typical black student in New York CIty attended school with 29 percent white students; in 2010, that percentage dropped to 17 percent. Half of the city’s over 1,600 schools were over 90 percent black and Hispanic as of 2012.

The two DOE representatives at the event, District 17 superintendent Clarence Ellis and deputy chancellor Dorita Gibson, spoke about the importance of integration and about their own experiences in both segregated and integrated school environments, though neither addressed specific DOE policy on the topic.

Advocates have largely been disappointed with de Blasio and Fariña’s public statements on segregation, and have argued that focusing on integration would serve de Blasio’s central goal of addressing income inequality.

Fariña’s comment last week that a local pen pal program could help solve the city's segregation problem frustrated advocates, as did de Blasio’s ensuing defense of Fariña’s statement.

“Some of the rhetoric I’ve heard from the chancellor and mayor has been deeply disheartening,” Torres said on Monday.

De Blasio has said that his administration is considering a number of possible policy solutions, including a system called controlled choice, an alternative zoning plan which would consider race and income in school admissions processes.

But no concrete policy has been announced yet, and de Blasio has pointed to his universal pre-kindergarten program as evidence that some existing education programs may have the side effect of helping to ease segregation.

"As a lifelong educator, the Chancellor knows firsthand that students learn from interacting and collaborating with classmates of diverse backgrounds,” Harry Hartfield, a DOE spokesman, said in a statement. “This is a priority for this administration, and we are committed to promoting diversity in our schools. We will continue to engage with partners across the City around this critical issue.”